Public lecture - Variants in medieval literature
© UB Heidelberg/Daniela Jakob
Victor Millet is Professor of German Philology at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, and has been invited for a USIAS research stay. His work spans the major genres of medieval German literature, the philological edition of medieval texts and - over recent years - the digital edition of medieval German texts.
Conference
This drives me crazy! Or : how I learned to love variants
We know, and have for many years - at least since Zumthor’s Essai de poétique médiévale (Toward A Medieval Poetics) - studied the fact that medieval literature is eminently 'variant', i.e., that the different copies of the same works display a permanent instability or 'mouvance' even in cases where we consider that the texts are fairly stable. No copy is identical to its predecessor. It is easy to identify and even to interpret when a certain passage is completely different in two copies. But what is difficult for us is to understand how exactly variance works when the copies say basically the same thing. What are the phenomena, what could be the principles underlying them, how can we understand the process, can we even measure it? These and other questions will be raised in the lecture. It remains to be seen whether this will yield answers.
The conference is in English and will be followed by a workshop for doctoral students: Unstable texts. Change as a principle of tradition (also in English), from 13.30-17.00. The idea of the workshop is to show from a diachronic and interdisciplinary perspective, based on the work of doctoral students, to what extent the notion of textual instability is relevant and productive in their field of research.
The conference and workshop are organised by Thomas Mohnike (2013 USIAS Fellow, Germanic and North European Worlds (MGNE), University of Strasbourg) and Marie-Sophie Winter (2023 USIAS Fellow, University of Picardy Jules Verne, TrAme, UR 4284), with support from USIAS.
